Why we build the team inside your company.

A company that needs software usually sees two choices. It can hand the work to an outside vendor, or it can hire its own team. I have worked on both sides of that choice since 2012, and I now recommend a third.

What outsourcing takes away

Outsourcing is quick to start and easy to explain to a board. The difficulty arrives later. The people who understand your system work for someone else. When the contract ends, or the vendor moves its best engineers to a larger account, the knowledge goes with them. You are left with the software and without the capability that produced it.

For a campaign website this hardly matters. For the system a bank, a telecommunications company or an airline runs on, it matters a great deal.

What hiring alone demands

Building your own team keeps the capability inside. It also asks you to do the hardest hiring first. Before you can hire good engineers you need someone who knows what good looks like: an architect who can decide what should be built, and a project manager who can run the delivery. Those are the scarcest people in the market, and a company whose business is something other than technology has little to offer them.

So the first hires are made with nobody qualified to judge them, and every later hire inherits that risk.

The third way

Technology Leadership Services builds the team inside your company and brings the leadership with it. A layer of senior specialists designs the work and answers for delivery: the project manager, the solution architect and the leads for operations, quality and security. The engineers are recruited, trained and managed as your own in-house, full-time team.

It starts on paper. Before anyone is hired, a solution architect writes the business requirement, the functional specification and the technical specification, and you approve them. You know what you will be asked to accept at the end before the project starts. Then we recruit, train and manage against those documents, and we stay to run it.

A vendor delivers a system. I would rather help a company own its technology capability.

What you own

The measure I care about is what the client owns at the end. There are three things: a team that works only for them, a documented standard for how that team works, and a system that does not depend on any one person. None of them leaves when a contract does.

A capability is what lets the next system be built too. That is the reason to build the team where it will be used.